Welcome to the continuing monthly EVE Blog Banters and our 59th edition! For more details about what the blog banters are visit the Blog Banter page.

This month’s version comes from commenter Zappity who asks:

“Probably been done before… What about local force projection (as opposed to the longer distance force projection that is often talked about)? I think of ‘terrain’ in EVE to be how systems are mapped together by gates. Strong tactics which exploit terrain have historically been extremely important in deciding battle outcomes. How does this apply in EVE in the presence of cynos?”

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You know that old story trope of knowing some place like the back of your hand? It’s a pretty common one in science fiction, you know probably know it well. Someone’s father took them through some treacherous area of space all the time on trading runs so now that skill will conveniently come in handy to escape the bad guys, or something like this. Wouldn’t it be awesome if the “terrain” of EVE allowed for this kind of play?

The second New Eden Open tournament is well underway, and so far things have been going along smoothly. The streams haven’t crashed, there has only been one fire alarm, and lots of ships have exploded.

As we roll on towards the final days of the tournament, let’s look back and pick things apart so far, and check if it’s worth your time to continue watching.

For the past four and a half years, the graph has hovered around that 30,000 mark; it is, for all intents and purposes, a plateau. But everything must come to an end sooner or later and that is what this blog banter is about.

What’s on the other side of that plateau?

Since its launch in 2003, EVE has seen a fairly consistent period of solid growth. At a certain point however, the jumps in player activity have really only followed expansions, a common effect with MMOs that have been around for a long period of time. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but EVE is facing a hard road ahead, and I’m thinking the plateau will begin a downward slope soon. Lets look at a few of the reasons for this.

In case you’ve been living under a rock the last few years, you will have noticed a huge surge in video game streaming. From major events in the realm of exports to the everyday player at home, on demand streaming is here to stay. Maybe it’s time that EVE Online gets on the air.

Now its not like there aren’t any EVE streams going on. Even a cursory glance on Twitch.tv shows around a dozen active streams during prime time here in the western hemisphere. Popular channels such as Mad_Ani, SirSqueebles, and TheMittaniDotCom attract hundreds of viewers on a regular basis, and when major conflicts are occurring those streams broadcasting them will have thousands of viewers. Even CCP has been using streaming services more frequently these days, showcasing events and new features.

There’s certainly interest in people wanting to stream, and people wanting to tune in to those that are streaming. So why not add that functionality to the EVE client?

There is precedent for this concept. Games such as War Thunder and Planetside 2 have Twitch integration built in, as does EA’s Origin client. Even NVIDIA’s ShadowPlay feature allows for recording and streaming of gameplay through the driver software.

The recently released PlayStation 4 has built-in streaming capability to two different services, and has been an interesting feature to observe in use. Players can easily stream the full user interface, or include viewer chat and a broadcaster camera shot if they own that peripheral. The ease at which people can start a stream and interact with viewers through a console has been interesting to observe. A feature that people had thought wouldn’t be used to any significant amount has become extremely popular with streamers and viewers alike.

Providing integrated streaming options for EVE Online could provide easy to use tools for any player to broadcast their gameplay for others. CCP could even go so far to build an interface like the PlayStation 4’s, stylizing it to fit in with established New Eden aesthetics. They could even allow for the selection of themed interfaces for each of the four major races in the game, nullsec organizations, and one themed after the corporation or alliance you belong to.

It’s worth noting that there’s a signal to noise issue that could arise from this. EVE isn’t exactly an action packed first person shooter, and it’s probably not everyone’s cup to tea to sit and watch someone ship spinning in stations. However, just like anything in this game, there’s always going to be someone interested in what others would consider to be mundane.

Showing all facets of the game to a wider audience only serves to highlight the diversity of experiences EVE affords, and an integrated, tailored streaming component could allow anyone to share those with others.

What do you think, is it worth CCP putting some effort to enhance the EVE client with this kind of functionality, providing it doesn’t take away from other more pressing development efforts?

UPDATE:

Looks like CCP’s had this one waiting in the wings for a Rubicon point release.

In the latest dev blog titled “Twitch Integration is Here!”, CCP Rise details the integrated Twitch streaming functionality. I still say there’s an opportunity to theme the stream with EVE livery, but who knows what the future will bring for this feature.

I for one can’t wait to see what players put out there for us to watch.

It seems that every couple of years, we are given reminders of just how tenuous the pact that exists between player and game developer can be. In recent days, CCP had been at the center of two community related issues that really highlight the passion behind those involved with EVE and its community.

For most games, developers go about their business tweaking things with few thoughts about how the players might feel. Their idea of community relations consists of hiring a meatshield in the form of a community management team, which spends a considerable amount of time enforcing forum rules rather than communicating concerns upstream. CCPs idea is to form a player government and hold yearly micro-parliaments with them. As progressive and bold a move as that is, it baffles me that they still continue to stumble when it comes to dealing with their customers.

Image Credit: Gamesradar

Recent proposed changes to the Terms of Service caused a significant uproar among the community because of an absurd short-sightedness in what CCP thought would be a minor adjustment to their policies. In order to provide more clear rules with regards to impersonation of other players, they inadvertently painted a target on one of the game’s most celebrated and despised of play styles — the scammer.

“After hearing the feedback and concerns of our players, we have decided to take a deeper look at what we should and should not be enforcing.”

The community’s response was swift, and totally in the right. They appreciate the intricacies of social engineering in order to set up a good scam, however abusing the UI in order to do it (letter substitutions in names, etc.) is far more offensive. By setting tighter policies, CCP would almost kill off a play style that has served to market the game in the past. CCP has since backed off on the change in order to reevaluate its wording, and also to take a look at the the entire Terms of Service and EULA in order to see what other issues lurk there that should be looked at. The CSM will be involved one way or the other.

And then there’s the SOMERblink scandal. Rare things in EVE have historically been given out as rewards for things such as participation in events, winning the alliance tournaments, that sort of thing. Part of the mystique surrounding rare ships in EVE is the knowledge that their numbers are finite, and in order to get them a pilot or organization would have had to accomplish something meaningful (or paid gobs of money to someone who own them). It’s risk versus reward in a very real sense.

“…it is easy to see why CCP Games might be somewhat confused as to the strength of the player reaction to the current arrangement with SOMERblink.”

CCP decided to work with the SOMERblink guys to provide new copies of rare ships as rewards that the site could give out to players. The issue was two-pronged: why was CCP giving away these rare ships again, thus taking away from their current rareness, and what was the relationship between them and SOMERblink that enabled that site access to such lucrative rewards?

CCP has often dealt with player-run community efforts, providing things like game time and other such harmless items for them to use in contests and giveaways. Players should understand that this is usually for marketing purposes, since players that are more active in the game’s community are less likely to stop playing. It also is like a little pat on the back to the community service operators, as CCP has always respected how passionate those people can be.

In Mat Westhorpe’s excellent writeup summarizing this, he brings the concept of CCP working with the community out into the open.

“The revelation that CCP Games’ community team has been providing rare gifts of significant in-game value as a way of rewarding selected community contributors has incited strong but divided opinion amongst EVE Online’s most vociferous players.”

This isn’t much of a revelation, CCP’s been pretty open about this kind of thing with community site operators. The real issue is that there’s never been any clearly defined criteria for what qualifies a community organization for getting ultra-rare goods over some Plexes.

I can’t help but pin that inconsistency on the different attitudes CCP has presented over the years to its community. Back during the days when the WDA podcast was in full swing, getting a developer to guest on the show was often only a matter of coordinated timing between a few folks in different timezones. Then as EVE became more popular, getting developer time was more tightly controlled, frequently losing out to mainstream gaming media who could be able to potentially deliver a message to a wider consumer base. Often it seemed that the organization as a whole was doing its best to shy away from getting asked the hard questions by a community show, even for a show that was recorded and released later.

The point I’m trying to make with this is that this kind of treatment came and went depending on who was in charge of community relations, and what the prime objective of the organization was at any given time. Serve the existing community, or try to grow it more through mainstream PR. It’s a balance they’ve never really nailed down, and doing so would probably be more perilous for them in the long term.

New, modem, socially integrated CCP has been trying out a lot of different tactics lately, and snuggling up with community sites again is among them. That might be as simple as a retweet for a funky article, a community profile in the dev blogs, or be as interesting as a bit of glad handing with fancy rewards to hand out, such as rare ships.

“We at CCP are committed to making New Eden the best and most immersive “sandbox” universe in all of video games.”

The problem as I see it is not that they are trying, it’s that the community’s perception of it is poisoned by long experience with CCP over the years, and with the inconsistency of community relations as a whole. Just as most companies of its kind that have experienced the kind of growth that they have, being forgetful of past mistakes comes with the territory. The real challenges for CCP: be more cognizant of how the things they do are perceived by their community, and come to terms with a community that, rightfully, continues to remind them that they’re only human.